they obviously wouldn#t price the package at a point where it means they earn less money.
they would have priced it at 100-120 million in that scenario so total revenue is 300-360 million.
exclusivity isn't helping consumers at all it's only helping football teams, players and broadcasting companies who can afford to buy the rights (which aren't many).
in my system it lowers the pricing so companies can afford it, offers more competition directly and benefits consumers.
obviously though we would need ofcom to come in and make these changes otherwise it's never going to happen.
The point we're making is that exclusivity may be worth a lot more to the broadcaster than you realise. You can't just cherry pick imaginary numbers to 'prove' your case (I've done the same to illustrate this). In your example where they price it at £100-120 million, maybe Sky would offer £400m for exclusive rights, beating the £360m they could get from selling it separately. Your reply will naturally be "ah, but in that case they'd price it at £150m * 3 = £450m".... then I'll say Sky would pay £500m for that... and so we'll escalate indefinitely until one of us gets bored
You say they wouldn't price it to a point where they'd earn less money, but the problem is if they raise the cost of the non-exclusive package too high, to make it bring back enough revenue to compete with an exclusive package, the number of broadcasters willing to pay that much will drop off. Sky might be willing to pay say £400m exclusive, but would tell you to jog on at £200m non-exclusive.
Essentially what we are saying is that from Sky's perspective, it isn't just about having access to sport that is important, it is also about making sure they are the ONLY provider who gives access to that content, thus 'forcing' people who want access to subscribe to their services (which brings them additional revenue above and beyond the payment for the Sports service).
Moving back to the general debate about what is good for consumers, arguably the problem at the moment is there is a kind of hybrid situation whereby all matches are exclusive in the sense that they can only be viewed on a single provider, but the different packages of matches may be bought by a different provider. I think there are six(?) packages in total so theoretically, you could have a situation where to watch all the televised EPL matches you'd need access to 6 telecom providers! Thus we've seen the likes of Setanta, ESPN and BT 'stealing' some of the matches away from Sky subscribers. The situation is compounded by the fact that these 'niche' providers (BT less so) have typically only needed to buy a single package to ensure they get some subscribers, there was no way all 6 packages were going to bought by them and thus let people ditch Sky and move over lock stock and barrel.
